Origins and History of the Hackers, 1961-1995

The Unix tradition is an implicit culture that has always
carried with it more than just a bag of technical tricks. It transmits
a set of values about beauty and good design; it has legends and folk
heroes. Intertwined with the history of the Unix tradition is another
implicit culture that is more difficult to label neatly. It has its
own values and legends and folk heroes, partly overlapping with those
of the Unix tradition and partly derived from other sources. It has
most often been called the “hacker culture”, and since
1998 has largely coincided with what the computer trade press calls
“the open source movement”.

The relationships between the Unix tradition, the hacker
culture, and the open-source movement are subtle and complex. They
are not simplified by the fact that all three implicit cultures have
frequently been expressed in the behaviors of the same human beings.
But since 1990 the story of Unix is largely the story of how the
open-source hackers changed the rules and seized the initiative from
the old-line proprietary Unix vendors. Therefore, the other half of
the history behind today's Unix is the history of the hackers.

At Play in the Groves of Academe: 1961-1980

The roots of the hacker culture can be traced back to 1961, the
year MIT took delivery of its first PDP-1
minicomputer. The PDP-1 was one of the earliest interactive computers,
and (unlike other machines) of the day was inexpensive enough that time
on it did not have to be rigidly scheduled. It attracted a group of
curious students from the Tech Model Railroad Club who experimented
with it in a spirit of fun. Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution [Levy]
entertainingly describes the early days of the club. Their most
famous achievement was SPACEWAR, a game of dueling rocketships loosely
inspired by the Lensman space operas of
E.E. “Doc” Smith.[18]

Several of the TMRC experimenters later went on to become core
members of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, which in the 1960s and
1970s became one of the world centers of cutting-edge computer
science. They took some of TMRC's slang and in-jokes with them,
including a tradition of elaborate (but harmless) pranks called
“hacks”. The AI Lab programmers appear to have been
the first to describe themselves as “hackers”.

After 1969 the MIT AI Lab was connected, via the early ARPANET, to
other leading computer science research laboratories at Stanford, Bolt
Beranek & Newman, Carnegie-Mellon University and elsewhere.
Researchers and students got the first foretaste of the way fast
network access abolishes geography, often making it easier to
collaborate and form friendships with distant people on the net than
it would be to do likewise with colleagues closer-by but less
connected.

Software, ideas, slang, and a good deal of humor flowed over the
experimental ARPANET links. Something like a shared culture began to
form. One of its earliest and most enduring artifacts was the Jargon
File, a list of shared slang terms that originated at Stanford in 1973
and went through several revisions at MIT after 1976. Along the way
it accumulated slang from CMU, Yale, and other ARPANET sites.

Technically, the early hacker culture was largely hosted on
PDP-10 minicomputers. They
used a variety of operating systems that have since passed into
history: TOPS-10, TOPS-20, Multics, ITS, SAIL. They programmed in
assembler and dialects of Lisp. PDP-10 hackers took over running the ARPANET
itself because nobody else wanted the job. Later, they became the
founding cadre of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) and originated
the tradition of standardization through Requests For Comment
(RFCs).

Socially, they were young, exceptionally bright, almost entirely
male, dedicated to programming to the point of addiction, and tended
to have streaks of stubborn nonconformism — what years later
would be called ‘geeks’. They, too, tended to be shaggy
hippies and hippie-wannabes. They, too, had a vision of computers
as community-building devices. They read Robert Heinlein and
J. R. R. Tolkien, played in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and
tended to have a weakness for puns. Despite their quirks (or perhaps
because of them!) many of them were among the brightest programmers in
the world.

They were not Unix programmers. The early
Unix community was drawn largely from the same pool of geeks in
academia and government or commercial research laboratories, but the
two cultures differed in important ways. One that we've already
touched on is the weak networking of early Unix. There was
effectively no Unix-based ARPANET access until after 1980, and it
was uncommon for any individual to have a foot in both camps.

Collaborative development and the sharing of source code was a
valued tactic for Unix programmers. To the early ARPANET hackers, on
the other hand, it was more than a tactic: it was something
rather closer to a shared religion, partly arising from the academic
“publish or perish” imperative and (in its more extreme
versions) developing into an almost Chardinist idealism about
networked communities of minds. The most famous of these hackers,
Richard M. Stallman, became the ascetic saint of that
religion.

Internet Fusion and the Free Software Movement: 1981-1991

After 1983 and the BSD port of
TCP/IP, the Unix and
ARPANET cultures began to fuse together. This was a natural
development once the communication links were in place, since both
cultures were composed of the same kind of people (indeed, in a few
but significant cases the same people). ARPANET
hackers learned C
and began to speak the jargon of pipes, filters, and shells; Unix
programmers learned
TCP/IP and started to
call each other “hackers”. The process of fusion was
accelerated after the Project Jupiter cancellation in 1983 killed the
PDP-10's future.
By 1987 the two cultures had merged so completely that most hackers
programmed in C and casually used slang terms that went back to the
Tech Model Railroad Club of twenty-five years earlier.

(In 1979 I was unusual in having strong ties to both the Unix
and ARPANET cultures. In 1985 that was no longer unusual. By the time
I expanded the old ARPANET Jargon File into the New
Hacker's Dictionary [Raymond96] in 1991,
the two cultures had effectively fused. The Jargon File, born on the
ARPANET but revised on
Usenet, aptly
symbolized the merger.)

But TCP/IP networking and slang were not the only things the
post-1980 hacker culture inherited from its ARPANET roots. It also
got Richard Stallman, and Stallman's moral crusade.

Richard M. Stallman (generally known by his login name, RMS) had
already proved by the late 1970s that he was one of the most able
programmers alive. Among his many inventions was the Emacs editor.
For RMS, the Jupiter cancellation in 1983 only finished off a
disintegration of the MIT AI Lab culture that had begun a few years
earlier as many of its best went off to help run competing
Lisp-machine companies. RMS felt ejected from a hacker Eden, and
decided that proprietary software was to blame.

In 1983 Stallman founded the GNU project, aimed at writing an entire free
operating system. Though Stallman was not and had never been a Unix
programmer, under post-1980 conditions implementing a Unix-like
operating system became the obvious strategy to pursue. Most of RMS's
early contributors were old-time ARPANET hackers newly decanted into
Unix-land, in whom the ethos of code-sharing ran rather stronger than
it did among those with a more Unix-centered background.

In 1985, RMS published the GNU Manifesto. In it he consciously
created an ideology out of the values of the pre-1980 ARPANET hackers
— complete with a novel ethico-political claim, a self-contained
and characteristic discourse, and an activist plan for change. RMS
aimed to knit the diffuse post-1980 community of hackers into a
coherent social machine for achieving a single revolutionary
purpose. His behavior and rhetoric half-consciously echoed Karl Marx's
attempts to mobilize the industrial proletariat against the alienation
of their work.

RMS's manifesto ignited a debate that is still live in the
hacker culture today. His program went way beyond maintaining a
codebase, and essentially implied the abolition of
intellectual-property rights in software. In pursuit of this goal, RMS
popularized the term “free software”, which was the first
attempt to label the product of the entire hacker culture. He wrote
the General Public License (GPL), which was to become both a rallying
point and a focus of great controversy, for reasons we will examine in
Chapter 16. You can learn more
about RMS's position and the Free Software
Foundation at the GNU website.

The term “free software” was partly a description
and partly an attempt to define a cultural identity for hackers. On
one level, it was quite successful. Before RMS, people in the hacker
culture recognized each other as fellow-travelers and used the same
slang, but nobody bothered arguing about what a ‘hacker’
is or should be. After him, the hacker culture became much more
self-conscious; value disputes (often framed in RMS's language even by
those who opposed his conclusions) became a normal feature of
debate. RMS, a charismatic and polarizing figure, himself became so
much a culture hero that by the year 2000 he could hardly be
distinguished from his legend. Free as in
Freedom [Williams] gives
us an excellent portrait.

RMS's arguments influenced the behavior even of many hackers who
remained skeptical of his theories. In 1987, he persuaded the
caretakers of BSD Unix that cleaning out AT&T's proprietary
code so they could release an unencumbered version would be a good
idea. However, despite his determined efforts over more than fifteen
years, the post-1980 hacker culture never unified around his
ideological vision.

Other hackers were rediscovering open, collaborative development
without secrets for more pragmatic, less ideological reasons. A few
buildings away from Richard Stallman's 9th-floor office at MIT, the X
development
team thrived during the late 1980s. It was funded by Unix vendors who
had argued each other to a draw over the control and
intellectual-property-rights issues surrounding the X windowing
system, and saw no better alternative than to leave it free to
everyone. In 1987–1988 the X development prefigured the really huge
distributed communities that would redefine the leading edge of Unix
five years later.

X was one of the first large-scale open-source projects to be
developed by a disparate team of individuals working for different
organizations spread across the globe. E-mail allowed ideas to move
rapidly among the group so that issues could be resolved as quickly as
necessary, and each individual could contribute in whatever capacity
suited them best. Software updates could be distributed in a matter
of hours, enabling every site to act in a concerted manner during
development. The net changed the way software could be
developed.

--Keith Packard

The X developers were no partisans of the GNU master
plan, but they
weren't actively opposed to it, either. Before 1995 the most serious
opposition to the GNU plan came from the BSD developers. The BSD
people, who
remembered that they had been writing freely redistributable and
modifiable software years before RMS's
manifesto, rejected GNU's claim to historical and ideological
primacy. They specifically objected to the infectious or
“viral” property of the GPL, holding out the BSD license
as being “more free” because it placed fewer restrictions
on the reuse of code.

It did not help RMS's case that, although his Free Software
Foundation had produced most of the rest of a full software toolkit,
it failed to deliver the central piece. Ten years after the founding
of the GNU project, there was still no GNU kernel. While
individual tools like Emacs and GCC proved tremendously useful, GNU
without a kernel neither threatened the hegemony of proprietary Unixes
nor offered an effective counter to the rising problem of the
Microsoft monopoly.

After 1995 the debate over RMS's ideology took a somewhat
different turn. Opposition to it became closely associated with both
Linus Torvalds and the author of this
book.

Linux and the Pragmatist Reaction: 1991-1998

Even as the HURD (the GNU kernel) effort was stalling, new
possibilities were opening up. In the early 1990s the combination of
cheap, powerful PCs with easy Internet access proved a powerful lure
for a new generation of young programmers looking for challenges to
test their mettle. The user-space toolkit written by the Free
Software Foundation suggested a way forward that was free of the high
cost of proprietary software development tools. Ideology followed
economics rather than leading the charge; some of the newbies signed
up with RMS's crusade and adopted the GPL as their banner, and others
identified more with the Unix tradition as a whole and joined the
anti-GPL camp, but most dismissed the whole dispute as a
distraction and just wrote code.

Linus Torvalds neatly straddled the GPL/anti-GPL divide
by using the GNU toolkit to surround the Linux kernel he had invented
and the GPL's infectious properties to protect it, but rejecting the
ideological program that went with RMS's license. Torvalds affirmed
that he thought free software better in general but occasionally used
proprietary programs. His refusal to be a zealot even in his own cause
made him tremendously attractive to the majority of hackers who had
been uncomfortable with RMS's rhetoric, but had lacked any focus or
convincing spokesperson for their skepticism.

Torvalds's cheerful pragmatism and adept but low-key style
catalyzed an astonishing string of victories for the hacker culture in
the years 1993–1997, including not merely technical successes
but the solid beginnings of a distribution, service, and support
industry around the Linux operating system. As a result his prestige
and influence skyrocketed. Torvalds became a hero on Internet time;
by 1995, he had achieved in just four years the kind of culture-wide
eminence that RMS had required fifteen years to earn — and far
exceeded Stallman's record at selling “free
software” to the outside world. By contrast with Torvalds,
RMS's rhetoric began to seem both strident and unsuccessful.

Between 1991 and 1995 Linux went from a proof-of-concept surrounding
an 0.1 prototype kernel to an operating system that could compete on
features and performance with proprietary Unixes, and beat most of
them on important statistics like continuous uptime. In 1995, Linux
found its killer app: Apache, the
open-source webserver. Like Linux, Apache proved remarkably stable
and efficient. Linux machines running Apache quickly became the platform
of choice for ISPs worldwide; Apache captured about 60% of
websites,[19] handily beating out both of its
major proprietary competitors.

The one thing Torvalds did not offer was a new ideology —
a new rationale or generative myth of hacking, and a positive
discourse to replace RMS's hostility to intellectual property with a
program more attractive to people both within and outside the hacker
culture. I
inadvertently supplied this lack in 1997 as a result of trying to
understand why Linux's development had not collapsed in confusion
years before. The technical conclusions of my published papers [Raymond01] will be summarized in Chapter 19. For this historical sketch, it will be
sufficient to note the impact of the first one's central formula:
“Given a sufficiently large number of eyeballs, all bugs are
shallow”.

This observation implied something nobody in the hacker culture had
dared to really believe in the preceding quarter-century: that its
methods could reliably produce software that was not just more elegant
but more reliable and better than our proprietary
competitors' code. This consequence, quite unexpectedly, turned out to
present exactly the direct challenge to the discourse of “free
software” that Torvalds himself had never been interested in
mounting. For most hackers and almost all nonhackers, “Free
software because it works better” easily trumped “Free
software because all software should be free”.

The paper's contrast between ‘cathedral’
(centralized, closed, controlled, secretive) and ‘bazaar’
(decentralized, open, peer-review-intensive) modes of development
became a central metaphor in the new thinking. In an important sense
this was merely a return to Unix's pre-divestiture roots — it is
continuous with McIlroy's 1991 observations about the positive
effects of peer pressure on Unix development in the early 1970s and
Dennis Ritchie's 1979 reflections on fellowship,
cross-fertilized with the early ARPANET's academic tradition of peer
review and with its idealism about distributed communities of mind.

In early 1998, the new thinking helped motivate Netscape
Communications to release the source code of its Mozilla
browser. The press attention surrounding that event took Linux to Wall
Street, helped drive the technology-stock boom of 1999–2001, and
proved to be a turning point in both the history of the hacker culture
and of Unix.

[18] SPACEWAR was not related to Ken
Thompson's Space Travel game, other than by the fact that both
appealed to science-fiction fans.